In Defense of Solitude (Part One)

— “The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to ourselves.” - Michel de Montaigne —

In his 1848 work Principles of Political Economy, John Stuart Mill observed:

It is not good for a man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species. A world from which solitude is extirpated is a very poor ideal. Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essential to any depth of meditation or of character: and solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur, is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without.

That notion — of solitude “as essential to any depth of meditation or of character” — sounds weirdly, disturbingly, antique today. We can’t very well turn off our cell phones or keep our e-mails unanswered, can we? And what if we know nothing of the news of the day?

Still, the idea of solitude as an essential, humanizing trait is one that’s been honored, and reiterated, for centuries by the best and most influential minds of Civilization. It’s an idea come down to us through the humanities — art, history, literature, philosophy, religion — those disciplines which Mark Slouka panegyrizes in this month’s Harper’s:

The humanities … teach us incrementally, endlessly, not what to do but how to be. …[They] are a superb delivery mechanism for what we might call democratic values.

OK, yet are we to count solitude as a “democratic value”? Yes indeed, for solitude is conducive to thought and introspection, and introspection conduces to empathy and education, and thus to George Washington’s ideal of an “enlightened” citizenry.

“Thought is neither instant nor noisy,” Wallace Stegner reminds us:

… It thrives best in solitude, in quiet, and in the company of the past, the great community of recorded human experience. That recorded experience is essential whether one hopes to reassert some aspect of it, or attack it.

Writing back in the 1500s, Michel De Montaigne assures us:

It is not good enough to have gotten away from the crowd, it is not enough to move; we must get away from the love of crowds that is within us, we must sequester ourselves and regain possession of ourselves. … That is what it is to choose wisely the treasures that can be secured from harm, and to hide them in a place where no one may go and which can be betrayed only by ourselves. … The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to ourselves.*

And Thoreau tells us in 1863:

When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. … Shall the mind be a public arena, where the affairs of the street and the gossip of the tea-table chiefly are discussed? Or shall it be a quarter of heaven itself ,— an hypaethral [open to the sky] temple, consecrated to the service of the gods?… It is important to preserve the mind’s chastity. …I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality.

And Nietzsche tells us in 1888:

Slow is the experience of all deep fountains: long have they to wait until they know what hath fallen into their depths. / Away from the marketplace and from fame taketh place all that is great: away from the marketplace and from fame have ever dwelt the devisers of new values. / Flee, my friend, into thy solitude…

By contrast to these enduring voices from Stegner’s “great community,” our present day culture of Reality TV and Social Media sends us the subtle but insidious messages that 1) being alone amounts to humiliation and inferiority, and 2) being unknown amounts to worthlessness and disgrace.

Writer Dave Eggers touched on this concept beautifully in his book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius:

We’ve grown up thinking of ourselves in relation to the political-media-entertainment ephemera, in our safe and comfortable homes … how we would fit into this or that band or TV show or movie, and how we would look doing it. [We] are people for whom the idea of anonymity is existentially irrational, indefensible.

“You are worthy or desirable,” declares the culture of today, “inasmuch as you can demonstrate acceptance by others via circuits and cables” (or in the case of reality TV, inasmuch as you remain in the group and avoid getting kicked off the show).

Similarly, we hear it declaimed: “You are valid, you are real, inasmuch as you publish evidence daily — even hourly (Twitter, anyone?) — of your existence, your validity.”

The unavoidable problem here, however, is that as much as we crave to avoid isolation and seek verification that we exist, the selves we wish verified are actually becoming less and less singular or unique, at least in the principle realm we use to verify them, the Internet.

Online we are more isolated than ever, but without the soul-shaping benefits of real aloneness. Why log on unless you hope to connect with somebody, or at any rate feel connected to the buzz of the day? Granted, the Web is more than minute-to-minute media (may we doff modesty a moment to take this blog as an example?), but you get my drift.

The Internet, by itself, also cannot provide us with real community. An e-mail is not a handshake. Nor are most Facebook friends likely to live close enough to keep an eye on your house while you’re away.

(Blogger’s note: Herewith, I face an incontrovertible irony — employing the Internet to outline the Internet’s dangers and deficiencies as today’s medium of choice. But hey, that the medium is good for some things can’t be denied. Onward, then.)

Online we live in the thick of one another’s quasi selves, what writer Neil Postman called “a neighborhood of strangers.” And however manifold are the “activities” we initiate or the information we access on the Internet, the medium demands that we stare at a screen, and therefore it cannot enable individuality. To the contrary, screen-time can only act as a force of psycho-physical leveling. To stare at a screen is, for everyone who does it, the same experience.

So, one cannot be beneficially alone on the Internet, and in a very real sense one cannot be wholly oneself, for individuality, personality, and independent thought are conditioned not by the acquisition of information or fiber optic “access” to others, but by varied experience (i.e. away from the terminal).

“The drift in the United States today is toward the submergence of the self into the Mass Mind,” writes Morris Berman in his book The Twilight of American Culture,

a trend that is powerfully encouraged by corporate culture and the new technology. Along with this — as in the early Middle Ages — we see the dissolution of interiority.

Berman’s pungent phrase “submergence of the self into the Mass Mind” inevitably conjures Aldous Huxley’s classic Brave New World (1932), which envisions a blissful and soulless future “paradise” expurgated of societal “ills” such as individuality, books, religion, marital life, and yes, personal solitude — all in the interest of industry (read: economic superiority), harmony (read: societal conformity and obedience), and ceaseless pleasure (read: distraction).

Huxley’s future world is no authoritarian dystopia. Rather, it’s a smoothly functioning society whose citizens, as far as they can imagine, couldn’t be happier or more productive. They are prosperous, well fed, pleasantly medicated, entertained, sexually promiscuous (it’s the norm, “everybody belongs to everybody else”), and desire nothing other than what’s offered to them by their station in the societal hierarchy. The key to their societal health and harmony is the eradication of individual desire through systematic “conditioning” begun at birth. A crucial component of this “conditioning” is an uninterrupted involvement in communal life, a forbiddance — and inculcated horror of — solitude

The following bit from the novel describes this culture of mass-identity.

The group was now complete, the solidarity circle perfect and without flaw. Man, woman, man, in a ring of endless alteration round the table. Twelve of them ready to be made one, to be fused, to lose their twelve separate identities in a larger being.

Now put them around the globe instead of around the table, make them a billion instead of twelve, and change “solidarity circle” to Internet. Creepy, for sure. Fortunately perhaps, the present climate of the Internet is much more fractious (at its best, articulate debate defines it) than Huxley’s gray-eyed group-think. But the point remains that we relinquish something quintessentially human in being constantly logged on, “accessible,” and vulnerable to the manipulation of our focus and the depletion of our attention-spans.

“Being online,” writes Sven Birkerts, “and having the subjective experience of depth, of existential coherence, are mutually exclusive situations.”

Meanwhile, the vocation of selfhood, the cultivation of personal, psychic, and spiritual independence, remains — and will remain, as ever — inescapably tied to solitude and its concomitants: privacy, slowness, inner quietude, and anonymity. All of which, of course, contradict our culture of connectivity and instantaneousness.

We modern mortals, like the generations before us, need to be re-set on a regular basis, reconditioned to the natural, non-mechanical pace of the world and of our own souls. Our age-old impulse toward meditation and prayer can itself reveal the intrinsic human impulse toward solitude.

Let the world’s course be what it may, you will always find a physician and helper, a new energy and future within yourself, in your poor, ill-used, tractable, indestructible soul.—Hermann Hesse (1917)**

Next Monday I’ll conclude this Defense with Part Two. Right now, I’m powering off in pursuit of solitude.

*Montaigne translation by Donald M. Frame, Selected Essays of Michel De Montaigne, Walter J. Black, NY, 1943.

**Hesse translation by Denver Lindley, My Belief: Essays on Life and Art by Hermann Hesse, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY, 1974.

You may also enjoy:

“In Defense of Solitude (Part Two)”

“Is the Internet Dangerous?”

“To Recharge, Unplug”

“A Song for the Unsung”

“Presenting … the Intravidual”

“When Connectivity Breeds Loneliness”

“Hazards of Career, Rewards of Vocation”

“On Slowness”

“Soul School”

“In Defense of ‘Aimless’ Learning”